A lesson learned about MMA fans, and the medium that makes them hate each other

Right off I’ll tell you, I’m not reading your comments. Not on this. Not on anything I write. Not in a house or with a mouse. I won’t do it.

I’d like to say it’s because I never read Internet comments anywhere, but that’s not totally true. Sometimes I read them, most often on sites where I know they’ll be horrible and infuriating and depressing, which I realize is a weird thing to do. But on this site? Where my own writing and the writing of my colleagues actually appear? Nope. Never.

It’s not because I don’t care what you think. I actually really do. It’s just that years of writing for the Internet has taught me that the psychological toll it takes to wade through it all is not worth whatever benefits I might be hoping for. The good and the smart and the insightful, even when there’s a lot of it, never outweigh the bad and the stupid and the troll-tastic. Especially not when it’s your own writing they’re commenting on. You could read 10 posts by people with something interesting to say, but you stumble across one intentionally vitriolic comment and your teeth are still grinding an hour later. By you I mean me. And by an hour I mean three. It’s possible this is a personal issue.

The point is, because I don’t read comments, I was unaware that there was someone impersonating me in the comments section until I started getting emails and tweets about it. Apparently this person with waaaaaaaay too much free time had written a lengthy screed complaining (mostly) about MMA fans, and signed my name to it. And people believed I’d written it. And, even worse, a lot of them claimed to agree with it.

That’s the part that really surprised me. Here were a bunch of MMA fans essentially agreeing with the statement that, man, MMA fans are the worst. That seems counterintuitive, but at the same time not totally surprising. At least internally, it seems like a recognizable part about the MMA fan psyche. One thing I feel like I’ve learned about MMA fans is that they can’t stand MMA fans. They hate them for running around events in obnoxious T-shirts acting like “Jersey Shore” extras. They hate them for being jerks on the Internet, hate them for acting like insufferable know-it-alls, hate them for booing Junior dos Santos after his loss to Cain Velasquez and making the nice Brazilian man sad. All of that.

To some extent, maybe that’s the mindset that comes with being a part of a community. Because you share at least one common interest and interact (sort of) with these people regularly, it’s easier to identify the things about them that you despise.

But even if we can all relate to the MMA-fans-are-the-worst sentiment on some level, I don’t think we really believe it. I think we believe it the same way many of us feel that our families are intolerable. They drive us crazy because we spend so much time around them, and also because we know each other so well. But if it came down to it, we’d probably rather be tormented by our own families than go sit through Thanksgiving dinner with some other weirdos.

The thing about MMA fans is, they’re passionate. It’s a misguided passion sometimes, and we often get carried away, but at least our sins are not ones of apathy. Apathetic people do not sit down in the middle of a Saturday afternoon to watch Facebook fights, followed by cable TV prelims, followed by a $55 pay-per-view, and then immediately flip open their laptops to watch a live stream of the post-fight press conference. Apathetic people do not spend this much time commenting on sport-specific websites, or arguing about top-10 rankings, or debating hypothetical fights that will never and can never happen. They don’t put together hilarious Photoshops or call in to radio shows that aren’t even on the actual radio. They don’t tweet so damn much.

MMA fans are, when you step back and think about it, some of the most engaged sports fans around. But because being an MMA fan means living in a certain type of bubble – a place where accidentally identifying a kimura armlock as an Americana will earn you swift and merciless derision – we forget that. We get pissed off at each other. We complain about each other, and we do it using the very same medium that has fed and sustained the sport since its dark, early days. We rarely pause to consider that maybe the medium is part of the problem.

In many ways, MMA still lives on the Internet. The problem is, something about the Internet tends to bring out the worst in us. Maybe it’s the anonymity or the isolation. We treat each other much worse online than we do in person, which can have a weird and unpleasant effect on our perception of one another, especially in a relatively small and passionate community like this one. The rules are different here, and not necessarily in a good way. Just consider the problem of trolling.

In real, physical interactions with one another, we do not typically pretend to hold opinions that we know to be infuriating to others. We don’t lie repeatedly and obviously just to gain attention. In real life, when you see a person shouting that he is an expert and everyone who can hear the sound of his voice is an idiot, you assume he is crazy or drunk or both. That’s uncommon behavior for human beings in the world. On the Internet, it’s just a normal day. On MMA websites and forums, it’s a slow day.

So yeah, of course we hate each other. Of course we come away thinking, my god, these MMA fans are just the worst. I’ve definitely slammed my laptop shut while feeling that way. That’s why I forbid myself from reading comments. I know where that leads, and I don’t want to go there because I want to keep enjoying this sport and the people in/around it.

The upside is, I’ve had the privilege of traveling all over the world to cover fights, and in those travels, I’ve met all kinds of MMA fans. When you sit down and have a beer with them, you realize they’re all just people. Good people, in my experience. Smart, interesting people who are really into at least one of the things that you are also really into. In the real world, that common passion might be the basis for a friendship, or at least a mutual respect. It’s only on the Internet that it’s an invitation to hate each other.

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